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Posts Tagged ‘User Experience’.

We are pleased to present below all posts tagged with ‘User Experience’.

An "affordance" is a perceived signal or clue that an object may be used to perform a particular action. A chair sits at around knee height and appears to provide support. It affords sitting. A toothbrush has a handle a little longer than the human palm. It affords gripping.

All of the objects that surround us have affordances: some are explicit (the “Push” sign above a door handle), and others are hidden (a chair could be used to break a window or used as a weapon). The term was first coined by psychologist James G. Gibson, then introduced to human-computer interaction by Donald Norman in his book The Psychology of Everyday Things, required reading for budding industrial and product designers everywhere.

How do you balance the creative control you give to the users, the usability of the product they make with your tool and the flexibility of that tool? We designers have always had a problem of handing over creative control to the general population — the basic users. There are two reasons for this.

The first is obvious: We are the ones who are supposed to know the principles of design and usability. Some of us were born with this feeling of what feels and looks right, while other designers have learned it — at least good designers eventually have.

When interacting with mobile devices, users have little patience for confusing interfaces or unnecessary steps that impede their progress. As designers, we must understand the role of momentum in effective user interface design and create experiences that keep our users moving forward.

Think about the act of checking email on a mobile device. This is probably one of our most efficient interactions with our phones; we do it while crossing the street, between conversations and even (for the dangerous few!) while driving. Every distracting bit of user interface (UI) that could get in the way of checking our email has been stripped from the design, making it a streamlined process that we love doing.

The mobile web is a harsh environment: mobile processors are slower than their desktop counterparts; network connectivity is flaky; bandwidth is low; latency is high; and touchscreen keyboards are slow. The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling these challenges.

In this article, we'll look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile device, memorize as much as you can about your users’ situation, presume that your users’ actions will succeed (and get them to their next task) and also how to predict your users’ next actions, and prepare accordingly.

How do we make navigation as simple and predictable as possible? As explained in part 1 of this series, the first two steps are to structure content in a way that naturally narrows the navigation options, and to explain those options in a way that minimizes the cognitive load on users.

However, two more steps are required — namely, to choose the right type of navigation menu, and then to design it. The second part of this series addresses the third step and discusses which type of navigation menu is best suited to which content.

How robust is your user experience design process? We all have our favored methods and techniques, but the general process is similar: Conduct research, prototype, then present to stakeholders and users.

We’ve delivered projects successfully, rectified problems and honed our ability to deliver in different scenarios. However, we all know that every project is unique, and every once in a while something will take you by surprise.

Our users are precious about their time and we must stop wasting it. On each project ask two questions: “Am I saving myself time at the expense of the user?” and “How can I save the user time here?” What is the single most precious commodity in Western society? Money? Status? I would argue it is time.

We are protective of our time, and with good reason. There are so many demands on it. We have so much to do. So much pressure. People hate to have their time wasted, especially online. We spend so much of our time online these days, and every interaction demands a slice of our time. One minor inconvenience on a website might not be much, but, accumulated, it is death by a thousand cuts.

Pattern libraries are a great source of inspiration and education for designers. But common practice doesn’t always equal best practice. In this post, we’ll look at why many common tutorial patterns are ineffective and how you can leverage game design principles to increase user engagement.

After the release of the first edition of Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, Intuit asked me to speak with its mobile team. I spoke at a high level about the value of patterns across industries (fashion, architecture, software and others) and how they are a useful teaching tool.

You probably know by now that you should speak with customers and test your idea before building a product. What you probably don’t know is that you might be making some of the most common mistakes when running your experiments.

Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. This article is your guide to designing quick, effective, low-cost experiments.

Having a comprehensive data report about your website is like having a Rosetta Stone to guide your decision-making process over the lifetime of the website. A powerful report combines data gathered from a variety of sources, including observation of and interviews with users, and analysis of the website’s analytics.

Assembling this information into one place will help you to make effective design decisions and determine key priorities and will strengthen your position when working with stakeholders. The goal is to put the key insights from your research of a website into a single document. The report would consolidate the most important discoveries from a variety of research techniques and would help you to identify trends.

As UX professionals, we often lead design exercises with our stakeholders, including immediate team members and external clients. In these brainstorming sessions, participants identify opportunities to improve the design, thereby aligning everyone’s vision and expectations of the project.

During such activities, teams will generate concepts as paper or whiteboard sketches. While these artifacts give a ten thousand-foot view of the emerging design, I would argue that they fall short of presenting the pieces as a whole, because they limit participants from visualizing interactivity and the system’s flow. This is where clickthrough prototypes enter the picture.

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